We are thrilled to welcome Dr Hao Chen as AURIN’s new Spatial Database Software Developer. Hao will lead the technical development of the Australian Urban Health Indicators (AusUrb-HI) project. The AusUrb-HI project is a collaboration between National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) facilities, AURIN, the Population Health Research Network (PHRN) and the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), and researchers that will develop a suite of new indicator data assets that improve the understanding of the health of Australian urban and regional populations. Other AusUrb-HI collaboration partners include Queensland University of Technology, RMIT University, and the Sax Institute.
Hao will lead the development and implementation of the AusUrb-HI system, coordinating and capturing requirements from partners and implementing the system accordingly. In doing so Hao will ensure the successful collaboration of the many partners involved and the creation of a robust solution that takes into account the sensitive nature of individual health data.
“AURIN provides me with a great opportunity to take the lead on the development and implementation of the AusUrb-HI project’s technical capabilities. The project leads to a platform that opens exciting possibilities – for research and decision-making purposes – to better understand the health of Australian urban and regional populations. With expertise and experience in both domains of spatial information science as well as information technology, I am keen to employ best practice methods and tools to develop such a platform with its hosted secure, cross-domain data assets,” Hao says.
Hao holds a bachelor’s degree in geographic information systems and digital mapping from Wuhan University, China. He has also completed a master’s and PhD in spatial information science at the University of Melbourne, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology. Hao’s PhD research looked at the way that people, as human beings in contrast to computers, talk about place information through place descriptions. He designed a spatial graph database model that enabled natural language place descriptions to become “digestible” to computers and information systems.
During his time at the University of Melbourne, Hao has worked as a tutor and research assistant. Although his background is mostly related to spatial programming, modelling and spatial databases, he also has interests across geographic information systems and science, information technology and computer science.